“It’s leviOsa, not levioSA!”

First off, today’s post was supposed to drop yesterday so I sincerely apologize. Life is kind of hectic right now, but I finally took the time to sit down and watch last Thursday’s State of Play starring Hogwarts Legacy.

Let me start this off by saying I love the Harry Potter series. So when this was announced, my hopes were thought the roof. Fast forward to today, and I’m not going to lie; I was pretty impressed by what I saw. I’m going to drop the trailer (14 minutes of developer walkthrough footage) below and my thoughts will be underneath.

My first thought when I watched this and listened to the developer talk was Bully (that classic Rockstar game) with magic. You take control of a 5th year student who starts Hogwarts late and has “plenty of catching up to do” between classes and schoolwork. When you’re not in class, you can roam around Hogwarts and the surrounding areas with plenty of puzzles to solve and mysteries to unravel.

Couple of points I thought about while watching the video:

• Character customization will be in the game. I hope it’s good because I love the memes of gamers recreating celebrities in game.
• You are sorted into one of the four houses in the beginning of the game. I do wonder how this is going to work; I’m assuming it’ll be based off of dialogue options, but I could be wrong. I’m trynna be in Gryffindor though so let me get the easy questions.
• Combat looks solid. That being said; they showed combat with no HUD and part of me is fearful that it might actually be a Batman Arkham clone (counterattack, attack, you know the super hero formula). I do hope I’m wrong.
• You can make friends (crazy right?) who can eventually teach you new abilities and become companions.
• The Room of Requirement seems to play a big part in the game, and you can customize the room to help you catch up, academically, to your classmates.
• The video ends with the character casting an Unforgivable Curse, and it makes me wonder if there will be some sort of morality system in the game.
• No release date was shown, but it’s still supposedly on track for 2022.

Not going to lie; I think this looks good. The game looks like a Harry Potter game, and I know that reads weird, but when you look at the magical combat and the world, it just looks so magical (see what I did there). It almost reminded of me of a Dark Souls game if you take FromSoftware’s gorgeous world design and infused it with Harry Potter. This game looks like the Harry Potter game fans have been waiting a long time for, and while I’m holding my breathe, I have a good amount of confidence in this title just based off of what I’ve seen in this trailer.

I mean realistically it’s a step in the right direction after some of the last Harry Potter titles have been mobile releases and LEGO titles… Just saying guys, it’s only up from here!

Please don’t mess this up Avalanche Software.